The King Sport in the Second City: Baseball Industrialization in the Dominican Republic, 1975

Baseball became an industry in the Dominican Republic in 1975 when a group of businessmen, sportswriters, broadcasters, and ballplayers formed the Cibao Summer League in the region north of the capital. Scouts looking for the next Juan Marichal had made Dominican ballplayers part of a hot business years before. But what the Cibao Summer League organizers imagined was new: baseball in the Dominican Republic was to be a national industry centered in the city of Santiago and the Cibao. This reimagining of the national pastime as a national industry legitimized the Balaguer government’s plans for industrialization. To gain government support for the professional baseball league, the Cibao Summer League organizers emphasized the social good brought by their league in terms of employment for ballplayers to empanada vendors. Support for the Cibao Summer League demonstrated the Balaguer government’s investment in the nation’s youth through investment in sport at the same time that the League’s industrial rationale made all financial incentives offered to industrialists amenable to the Dominican population. Through the case of the Cibao Summer League, this paper will expose some of the contingencies behind the nation’s industrial and democratic development in the mid-1970s. The competition between industrialists in Santo Domingo and Santiago and the narratives they presented to the public shaped the political and economic experiences of the Dominican Republic through the end of the Cold War. The case of the Cibao Summer League reveals the malleability of popular understandings of the proper relationship between democratic government and economic interests as well as the complicated relationships that created the present-day dominance of neoliberal policies.